The Quivering Tree

by S. T. Haymon

  She took a handkerchief out of her pocket, a sensible-sized one, not the lacy kind my mother went in for, not a bit of use for wrapping hunks of bread and jam in.

  ‘No crumbs, mind!’ Miss Locke scooped every last crumb off the bread board into her cupped hand before popping her little haul into her little mouth. She aligned board and knife exactly as they had been before, and returned the pot of jam to its shelf. She handed me the handkerchief-wrapped booty, which I received too overwhelmed even to say thank you. ‘That at least should make sure we don’t find a corpse in the morning. Up you go now – quietly!’

  If I nearly disobeyed this injunction, she had only herself to blame for it. Half-way up to the landing, going slowly and carefully so as not to create crumbs whicn might give us both away, I became aware of Miss Locke’s footsteps on the stairs behind me, going faster than I. The next moment, she pinched my bottom.

  ‘Hurry up, slowcoach!’ she hissed in my ear, edging past.

  On the landing she waited until I had completed my own ascent, gone to my room and shut the door. A little later, standing on the thin chenille rug that lay between my bed and the chest of drawers, the bread and jam, wrapped and untasted, still in my hand – the whipped cream walnut, set down on the bed for a moment, had slid down into the dip in the middle – I heard a door opening and guessed that Miss Gosse had been awakened by the sound of Miss Locke’s footsteps on her way to her own bedroom, and had got out of bed to speak to her. I heard only the sound of voices, not what was said. I heard Miss Locke laugh – at least I think it was her – and say something or other, and then I heard a door shut.

  I sat on my bed in the dark to consider that nobody had ever pinched my bottom before. I did not consider it at all nice.

  A schoolmistress!

  I unwrapped the bread and jam and ate it all up in indignant bites that must have interfered with my digestion, for I could feel the bread stuck somewhere at the back of my breastbone. Then I went to bed. Only when the alarm went off at 6.45 did I remember the whipped cream walnut in the dip, and for a dreadful moment thought that I had gone to sleep on top of it. Visions of melted chocolate and goo stuck to the sheet made me wish never to wake up again. When, albeit reluctantly, my eyes insisted on opening on their own account, I saw that in fact the whipped cream walnut had fallen on to the floor and was still edible. My spirits rose, readying for what the new day might hold, not only by way of breakfast but by way of everything.

  Just to be on the safe side, though, I polished off the whipped cream walnut before I went down to the dining room. Which, considering that breakfast turned out to consist of a mingy bowl of cornflakes and one triangle of toast – only one! – was just as well.

  Chapter Six

  The Sprowston Road sloped gently but unremittingly down to the city, a fearsome freewheeling joy as my Hudson gathered momentum with a fine disregard for a child’s hands desperately squeezing its unresponsive brakes. The bicycle, which had belonged to my sister Maisie before she had grown up and gone to work in London, weighed a ton, or something not far short of it. Knowing nothing of bicycles, my parents had purchased the vehicle – it seemed a kind of lèse majesté to call it anything less – following their general principle that what was solid and heavy must, for that very reason, be superior to what was hollow and light. Downhill, it gave gravity a new meaning. Uphill it equalled a hellish ache in the calves; and even as, in a shocked way and suppressing an impulse to scream, I enjoyed the first part of my first ride from Chandos House to school, my legs were already anticipating the anguish of the ride back.

  A journey which had to be undertaken four times a day, what was more. After breakfast, to my consternation, there had been no packet of sandwiches proffered for putting into my school case before it was strapped to the bike carrier. Was it possible that my frugal hostesses dispensed with lunch altogether?

  ‘We prefer to have our main meal at midday,’ Miss Gosse had mercifully explained. ‘So much healthier, and as we have an hour and a half there really is ample time so long as we (I could tell she meant “you”) don’t hang about chatting.’

  Shooting the slope not quite out of control, I heard a bicycle bell behind ringing like mad. It was Miss Locke trying to catch up with me.

  ‘Next on the right!’ she shouted.

  I could have done with more notice. As it was, I shot across the bows of a United bus which luckily had better brakes than mine, up a turning which, with the illogic of geography, rose from the gentle planes of the Sprowston Road like the motte of Norwich castle. Momentum carried me up the first few feet of this precipice, after which the same gravity that an instant earlier had lent wings to my flight grabbed me by the rear wheel so fiercely that I had, more or less, to fall off and push – just at the moment, too, when Miss Locke and Miss Gosse sailed past, Miss Locke making nothing at all of the gradient and Miss Gosse’s stumpy legs pumping away merrily nineteen to the dozen.

  Pushing the Hudson up the hill was almost as hard as actually riding it. I wanted to call out to the pair disappearing in the distance that I was a convalescent, it wasn’t my fault; but they had vanished round the curve of the motte, on to the plateau which ended at the school gates. By the time I myself had arrived at the latter, it was to find their two bicycles parked smugly side by side in the reserved racks, and they themselves, no doubt, at their leisurely robing in the Staff Room. For my especial benefit the gong was well into the unctuous ululation which meant time was running out and prepare to meet thy Maker – or rather, Mrs Crail, which was infinitely worse.

  I dashed to the cloakroom, hung up my shoebag, tore off my panama and blazer, changed my shoes even though there wasn’t time for such fussiness, except that to put a foot still clad in an outdoor shoe to a school floor was a capital offence. I ran to deliver the letter which alone would readmit me to the sacred portals – Dr Parfitt’s letter which certified that I was fit to return to my studies provided that, for the remainder of the term, I was excused gym, games, and, by implication, any other dangerous physical pursuit such as racing to get into the Assembly Hall for prayers ahead of the headmistress.

  Miss Reade, the school secretary, had her office next door to the headmistress’s room. As I knocked, waiting to be told to enter, Mrs Crail emerged from next door in all her glory, Bible in hand, gown filled with some celestial thermal that was bearing her along, if not aloft, everything in place but the halo.

  ‘Back at last, Sylvia!’ At sight of me her little eyes disappeared in one of her crinkled smiles. The voice was like a dose of salts. I knew better than to expect any expression of gratification at my restoration to health. ‘Let us hope in more conciliatory mood. No more threats of revolution, I trust, to make us all tremble in our boots.’

  She really was an old devil the way she nourished herself on the remembrance of ancient grudges. English was her subject and donkeys’ years ago, working through some exercise in Marriott’s English, we had been instructed to come up one at a time to the blackboard and inscribe thereon any one word whose sound – sound, mark you – we thought among the most beautiful in the language. Despite this emphasis on purely aural values, most of the first girls to go up to the board under Mrs Crail’s sneering, smiling gaze, wrote words like Mother or Baby, or Jesus which, to my way of thinking, was not only soppy in the extreme but directly contradictory to what was being demanded of us. The textbook specifically enjoined us to ignore meaning. The sound was all.

  Pondering in the time available what should be my own contribution, I hit on the word Evolution. Mouthing it silently, I relished the way it rolled over the tongue, like chocolate fudge sauce. By the time it came to my turn to perform, I had made a slight alteration to my first draft. Not Evolution but Revolution. Revolution really rolled. One little ‘r’ made all the difference.

  When I had written the word on the blackboard in my best print, I stood back and regarded my handiwork with a certain modest satisfaction. Even in chalk Revolution sounded good. Mrs Crail who, making
her own rules, had commended the Mothers and the Babies and the Jesuses, looked at Revolution and smiled and smiled; following upon which she told me what she thought of the company I kept, obviously consisting of anarchists, Bolsheviks, and the descendants of those abominable Frenchmen who had cut off the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. A ritual erasing of the infamy, she took hold of the dampened felt pad we used for cleaning the blackboard and rubbed the offending word out. This pad, never damp enough, was by mid-morning always full of powdered chalk. You had to know how to use it, gingerly, and even then you were lucky not to get chalk dust in your hair and your mouth among other places. Since Mrs Crail always appointed blackboard monitors on whom the duty – and the powdered chalk – customarily fell, it could not be said that she was unaware of the drawbacks of the blackboard eraser. In the warmth of the moment she had just forgotten.

  Revolution disappeared in a shower of chalk dust which, settling on Mrs Crail, found plenty to settle on. When at last, breaking an intolerable silence, I muttered haltingly – in Mrs Crail’s presence I was seldom able to express myself in any other way – that all I had meant by Revolution was wheels turning round, not the guillotine or anything like that, she gave me twenty-five lines for impertinence.

  Actually, obeying the instructions of the eponymous Mr Marriott, I hadn’t meant anything. Not that it would have made any difference to have said so, the little episode being merely a continuation of the malign fate which from my first entry into the school had gone out of its way to foul up any relationship I might have had with its headmistress.

  To quote another instance.

  In St Gregory’s Alley, a pedestrian way tumbling downhill from Goat Lane to St Benedict’s, an undistinguished building advertised itself as the local headquarters of the ILP, initials whose meaning I had never thought to probe until, passing by one day, I noticed that, following some refurbishment of the premises, its facade was now emblazoned with the words, ‘INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY. FREE READING ROOM AND LIBRARY. OPEN TO ALL.’

  Unable to resist such an invitation, I went inside, only to be disappointed. The library, so far as I could see, consisted of two bookcases filled with dejected-looking books with titles that for the most part I could make neither head nor tail of. The sole occupant of the room, an equally dejected-looking woman who sat at a card table with a box file on it, regarded me with such distrust that, if only to establish my standing as a member of the literate classes, I felt impelled to pull out a book at random and bring it over to her with my best smile, which for all the good it did me I might as well have saved for a more propititious occasion.

  ‘I’d like to borrow this one, please.’

  Having printed my name, my address, and the name of my school on one of her cards, she let me have it eventually, reluctantly. It was clear from her manner that she did not expect any cachet to accrue to the ILP from its having secured my custom. The book clasped to my chest, I walked out of the building bang into Mrs Crail, who just happened (of course!) to be descending St Gregory’s Alley at that fateful moment. The title of the book, which (of course!) just happened to be turned outward for anybody to read was: Father Gapon: Martyr of the Russian Revolution.

  Mrs Crail took Dr Parfitt’s letter from me, and opened it. Perusing the contents, her smile grew even jollier than usual.

  ‘There are seven weeks left of term,’ she announced at the end, as if telling me something I didn’t know. ‘How your doctor can predict the state of your health in seven weeks’ time is beyond my imagining.’ Handing the letter back as if divesting herself of something subtly unclean: ‘Tell Miss Reade you are excused games for the next three weeks. Three weeks. I hope I have made that clear?’ I nodded dumbly. ‘Thereafter, failing a fresh letter, you will be required to join in all normal school activities, the same as everybody else.’

  ‘Don’t let it worry you, dear,’ comforted Miss Reade after the headmistress had sailed away, smiling. ‘Her bark is worse than her bite. She’s all right, really.’

  Across the arc of the years I still have to say that I don’t think Mrs Crail was all right, really; and as between her bark and her bite there was nothing much to choose. You could catch rabies from either. It may be vanity which convinces me that she did not hate the sight of me the instant I first came within range of those smiling eyes. It was only after I had settled into the school and let down my guard that the rot set in. It was then that she made the shocking discovery that I was an enthusiast, a category of persons which, along with clever dicks, she seemed to regard as having been put on earth to try her, her especially. What she clearly aimed for in her school was a pleasing mediocrity on the part of all concerned, staff and pupils alike. No difficulties, no surprises. ‘You!’ she would exclaim, jabbing a pudgy forefinger at the miscreant who had dared to be difficult or surprising, and smiling all over her face as she returned an essay marked with a big blue ‘R’ (for ‘Repeat in the Detention Room after school’). ‘You are a clever dick. A little less cleverness next time, if you please!’

  Mrs Crail taught English – her own tunnel-vision version of it, that is. Not the incomparable jewel-box of language, the treasure-house of literature my father and my brother Alfred had encouraged me to recognize it to be, but English as a pinched, sectarian cult devoted to the worship of an obscure deity called the Syllabus. According to its inflexible tenets, as promulgated by its high priestess, one did not inquire of a poem, ‘Is this good?’ or, for that matter, ‘Is this bad?’ but only ‘Is it in the Syllabus?’ If the answer to the question was no, then, even if its beauty took you by the throat or its unique insights transformed your life, thumbs down. Cast it into that outer darkness reserved for quotations that would never be required in an examination paper.

  As an enthusiast, I found myself – to my sorrow, for I would truly have preferred a quiet life to one poised forever on the brink of catastrophe – unable to keep my mouth shut. If only Mrs Crail had taught arithmetic, say, I could gladly have stayed mum from the beginning of the lesson to the end of it, and she could have marked me down as a model citizen. But how to stay silent when you had just that minute discovered ‘Christabel’? Not in the Syllabus! Or ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’? Not in the Syllabus! Or Oscar Wilde? NOT IN THE SYLLABUS!

  Chapter Seven

  There was a lot of window glass about in the Secondary School. Seen from the bottom of St Clement’s Hill, the swell of the land lending importance, the two-storey main building looked fairly imposing, although its pomp and circumstance in fact housed nothing much but cloakrooms and office with, above, the labs positioned strategically where their bad smells could waft away on the breeze to the houses on the other side of the road, without distress to the sensitive nostrils of the budding young academics below. Out of sight behind this somewhat meretricious facade, the classrooms arranged around two quadrangles divided by the Assembly Hall were bungaloid and open-air, the brain-children of an architect who must either have hated little girls or could never in his own youth have attended a school constructed on such principles.

  Admittedly, in summer the long narow rooms, tall windows taking up one long side, folding doors the other, had a lot going for them. Thistledown and the occasional butterfly drifted through: house-sparrows, surreptitiously encouraged by trails of crumbs, popped in and out to relieve the tedium apparently inseparable from getting an education. In winter, on the other hand (to say nothing of the other foot), the school raised the finest crop of chilblains in East Anglia, if not the entire British Isles. In the proclaimed cause of reducing the incidence of piles contracted by sitting on radiators with nothing between young bums and their sizzling convolutions except school bloomers, underfloor heating had been installed, the pipes unfortunately at a depth which, whilst they may have contributed to keeping the magma beneath the earth’s crust pleasantly warm, on the surface had to be taken on trust, of which there was not a lot about.

  Keep both feet firmly on the floor at all times was the standing,
not to say sitting, order, and you’ll be all right, glowing with health. Certainly, the mercury dropping like lead, the ink thickening in the inkwells, our noses glowed as we strove unavailingly to discourage down-dropping mucus from its ambition to form a stalactite, and our chilblained toes grew itchy to the point where pain became an exquisite torture, almost enjoyable. ‘Are your feet firmly on the floor, girls?’ sounded despairingly from mistresses themselves prowling to and fro like caged animals in the space between blackboard and desks in the interest of keeping their own circulation from calling it a day.

  The school rule was that when the temperature, as registered on the thermometer attached to the frame of the folding doors, showed something sub-arctic – fifty degrees Fahrenheit is the number which intrudes itself on my recollection (though I may be mistaken: it could have been 273° Absolute) – windows were permitted to be shut, doors unfolded to form a fourth wall against the encroaching ice. As a result of this dispensation, in cold-getting-colder weather very little work got done, the mistresses’ little promenades bringing them on transparently disguised ploys to check the thermometer, the pupuls’ energies concentrated in a fierce communal act of willing the temperature down.

  ‘Don’t breathe on it!’ Maria Veronese, whose genes were tuned to a warmer clime, would plead when Miss Adams, our form-mistress, who was short-sighted, put her face close to the glass when taking a reading. ‘You’ll warm it up!’

  What busy bees we were once the crucial number was passed, running for the long hooked poles that slammed the windows shut, hauling the doors along their metal trackway like sailors in HMS Pinafore. The quadrangles were alive with activity. We could have murdered Alice Boulter, the form half-wit, for screaming out as if it were good news: ‘It’s going up, Miss! The temperature’s going up!’